There could hardly be two operas less similar than “Thaïs” and “The Mother of Us All.”

“Thaïs,” a few gallons of French Romantic cream whipped into a lush, lurid frenzy by Jules Massenet, runs at the Metropolitan Opera through Dec. 2. “The Mother of Us All,” Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s wryly surreal Americana pageant about the struggle for women’s suffrage, completes a two-weekend run in Hudson, N.Y., on Sunday.

But it was not just seeing the works back to back last weekend that made them seem partners. It was, rather, the way they both ended.

In John Cox’s Met production, the dying Thaïs finishes the opera sitting motionless on a throne with her face caked in gray, more symbol than substance — a singing statue. Susan B. (Anthony, that is), the heroine of “The Mother of Us All,” sings her final aria as literally a singing statue: Reflecting on her life and work, she has been transformed, in Stein and Thomson’s fantasy, into the marble monument of herself that now stands in the Capitol rotunda in Washington.

Two women, a courtesan in Byzantine Egypt, clashing with a monk not sure if he desires sex with her or her salvation, and a Massachusetts-born activist, thrust into conflict with those who oppose giving her the vote. Both, in the end, rendered immobile by battle with men.

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Ailyn Pérez and Gerald Finley in Massenet’s “Thaïs” at the Metropolitan Opera.CreditEmon Hassan for The New York Times

Men are always shifting the ground under both protagonists’ feet. Faced with Andrew Johnson and Thaddeus Stevens and their seductive, fruitless negotiations, Susan B. can only moan: “They won’t vote my laws, there is always a clause, there is always a pause, they won’t vote my laws.”

And the expectations placed on these women are predictable only in their unpredictability. First Thaïs is too sensual for Athanaël, the tortured monk, and then, once she agrees to follow his ascetic path into the desert, she’s not sensual enough. (Tale as old as time.)

The goal so often is to run down, beat down and slow down powerful women — to an actual standstill. The pain of both operas was seeing that strategy in action, and seeing it work. Indeed, the exhaustion of merely being a woman in the world was the unavoidable, unbearable theme of these performances.

And there has rarely been a master of exhaustion like Michaela Martens, the mezzo-soprano whose Susan B. is simultaneously mythical and accessible. In a pinstriped suit jacket and dress pants, her hair fashionably yet sensibly blown out, her face open but her mouth a downward slash of worry, Ms. Martens could be the sort of working mom we all know.

A lawyer trying to avoid gropes as she tries to make partner, perhaps. Or a politician forced, time and time again, to argue — her tone measured and patient, but for the stridency that sometimes creeps in at the injustice of it all — with those unworthy to share a stage with her.

Her story is told, in Stein’s inimitably gnomic text, as a series of quasi-perplexing episodes mashing made-up characters with fanciful versions of historical figures. John Adams pines for Constance Fletcher; Jo the Loiterer marries Indiana Elliot and they bicker about changing her name; in the work’s heart-rending climax — laughably anticlimactic to describe — her allies try to get Susan B., wearied to her core, to leave her house and speak at one more meeting.

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Ella Loudon as Indiana Elliot in “The Mother of Us All.”CreditLauren Lancaster for The New York Times

Thomson’s score is a mélange of town-square brassiness and Stephen Foster-esque parlor hymns, a panoply that seems to pierce to the very heart of our country’s past and spirit. In R.B. Schlather’s quietly poignant production, performers walk, sit and stand among the audience, which sits around the perimeter and on the carpeted floor of Hudson Hall, an old gathering space where the real Anthony lectured.

Not all those wonderfully vivid performers are professionals; some untrained voices and unpracticed bodies add to the sense that “The Mother of Us All,” for all its sophisticated stylization, is the story of all of us, today as before. The costumes are an explosion of cross-chronological thrift-store kitsch, faded Disney T-shirts meeting tight Victorian coifs, on endless procession around this Anyhall, U.S.A., the crisp late-afternoon autumn light filling it, then gradually dimming.

Light and dusk coexisted, too, in Ms. Martens’s voice, radiant cries down to beleaguered sighs. She stood very still, indeed, for her final aria, a shining, stirring paean, poised between hope and despair, to her “long life” and the endless frustration that is political action: “Going forward may be the same as going backward.”

That “Thaïs,” in Mr. Cox’s unabashedly campy production, resonated with this “Mother” is largely because of the restraint of its stars, Ailyn Pérez and Gerald Finley, and the sensitivity of its conductor, Emmanuel Villaume.

There was a certain meatiness missing in the voices of both Ms. Pérez and Mr. Finley, a certain sumptuousness, but they compensated with accuracy, intelligence, earnestness. They chose to play actual people rather than caricatures, a decision that made the charged interactions this agonized man and this misunderstood woman feel surprisingly — and, in today’s world, uncomfortably — real.

But not as real as Ms. Martens, watching the parade of history continue without her at the end of “The Mother of Us All.” Her stillness, her exhaustion, was both a kind of death and a kind of eternal patience. She was standing her ground.